April 25, 2005

What's the Matter With Thomas Frank?

By DHinMI

Thomas Frank has a piece in the latest New York Review of Books called "what's the matter with the liberals?" I've enjoyed Frank's work for years, going back to The Baffler. He's a wonderful writer, and he does excellent research into the rightwing and how they bait with culture and switch to economics. My problem with Frank, however, is that he tends to blame the Democrats' for the Republicans' successes without looking at context. Furthermore, his understandable fascination with the rhetoric and mendacity of the conservatives and Republicans monopolizes his attention, and he gives too little attention to structural, historical and contextual issues behind campaigns. He's supremely talented at description, but until he applies those descriptive talents more equally, his failure to more fully engage contemporary liberalism and the present-day Democratic party will keep him from developing the cogent and balanced analysis of the interplay between conservatives and liberals that I hope he writes soon.

His latest piece is definitely worth a read. He does a nice job of laying out the broad strokes behind the Republicans' strategy of hiding savage class-warfare economics beneath a hard-edged cultural populism raged against "liberal elites." The reader well-informed on the reactionary populist politics of the last 40 years won't find much new in his analysis, but he provides a clear and succinct summary of recent rightwing populism, with several examples from the last presidential election.

My problem is that he doesn't seem anywhere near as interested in analyzing the "left" or liberals or the Democrats as much as blaming them for hapless acquiescence and impotence in the face of a much more determined and disciplined foe, as when he claims that a "newcomer to American politics, after observing this strategy in action
in 2004, would have been justified in believing that the Democrats were
the party in power, so complacent did they seem and so unwilling were
they to criticize the actual occupant of the White House."

One might argue that the charge is accurate, even though he offers no evidence to support the claim (in contrast to the excellent examples he gives of backlash rhetoric and tactics). It's also not necessary for Frank to become an expert on liberals or the Democratic party (although it would help). And as I said, his NYR article is very good at describing right-wing populism. However, his goal is broader:

The 2004 presidential campaign provides a near-perfect demonstration of
the persistent power of backlash—as well as another disheartening
example of liberalism's continuing inability to confront it in an
effective manner.

I would love to see Frank apply his prodigious gifts to analyzing the interplay between the "class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism" and actual liberalism. (Attention Amy Sullivan, Matt Bai and the rest of the "Democrats are elitists, let the proles eat values" crowd--Frank calls it "the perceived arrogance of liberalism.) But to analyze the dynamic between backlash and liberalism, Frank has to understand and describe liberalism, show how it "works" with at least some of the insight he's applied to his study of the right, and he's got to address structural issues, like realignment, financial advantage, historical trends, demography, etc. He's done a wonderful job of defining and describing the rightwing populist backlash, and in this piece he talks about, among Republicans, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Sam Brownback, Donald Rumsfeld and Arlen
Specter. Among conservative activists, propagandists, etc., he mentions Michael Novak, John O'Neill, Gary Bauer, James Dobson, Norman
Podhoretz, Michael Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan, Sean Hannity, Michael
Medved, Paul Weyrich, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Noel Sheppard. He mentions Zellout's defection to the Republicans. But only one active public figure is mentioned on the "liberal" side: John Forbes Kerry. In no way is John Kerry's performance in the last presidential campaign a sufficient basis on which to pass broad conclusions about the ability of "liberalism" to stand against class-based reactionary backlash.

It's also a problem to talk about "liberals" and "liberalism" and only talk about the 2004 presidential race; outside of Kerry's 1972 campaign, Frank never mentions Congressional races, governors' races, or legislative and downballot races. It's also a strain to characterize John Kerry's failure to beat George Bush as an example of "liberalism's continuing inability to confront" the rightwing
backlash. Why isn't the inability to confront the rightwing backlash
John Kerry's, especially since, as a Massachusetts Brahmin
with an Olympian demeanor whose most difficult race was against the
even bluer blooded William Weld, Kerry hadn't faced such reactionary
populism in over 30 years? Kerry was custom-made for an attack of
reactionary populism. No matter who Democrats nominated, he was going
to be attacked, but had the nominee been Edwards, Clark or Gephardt,
the reactionary populism would not have been as easy a sell for the
Republican propogandists and hatchet men.

The 2004 election was less a referendum on reactionary populism vs. liberalism than it was a referendum on George Bush and John Kerry. For a sitting president not presiding over a horrendous economy (like Hoover and Carter), Bush was remarkably weak. But in many ways, Kerry was even weaker, mostly due to his geography, his less-than-engaging style, his many years in the Senate which opened him up to attacks on "flip-flopping," which he exacerbated with boneheaded comments like "I voted for the $87 million before I voted against it.". Despite Bush's disastrous policy performance, Rove and his team effectively used the powers of incumbency, and succeeded in beating Kerry in a tightly contested tactical campaign. Thomas Frank has vividly described what the Republicans did to help George W. Bush by knocking down John Kerry so they could sneak by Kerry on the margin of 118,000 votes in Ohio. Hopefully he's soon apply his tremendous gifts to analyzing liberals and Democrats so he can provide a comparative analysis of American politics that doesn't simply describe the actions of our opponents, but discovers effective strategies and tactics for liberals and Democrats in the future.

Well, being a liberal and being a Democrat are, unfortunately, two different things. I don't want to go all Ralph Nader, but the Democratic Party hasn't been the greatest defender of liberalism in recent years. 2004 wasn't simply some outlying exception.

The thing is, I think Kerry is a true liberal, but I think he got too caught up in trying to be a politician first and a liberal second. He tried to articulate some centrist philosophy rather than his true beliefs and it came out as a mess.

So I agree with DH that one can critique recent Democratic strategy without scoring any points against liberalism per se; but until the day when liberalism is actually given a voice in national elections, it's going to remain a moot point.

Very much agreed with your take on Thomas Frank. He is perceptive and a great writer, but badly needs to widen his scope.

re: your description of Bush as remarkably weak, with which I disagree: Bush had one issue hand of devastating psychological weight to play, terrorism, and he played it well. (The Bin Laden video release didn't hurt). In this way the 2004 election is an anomaly, tactically comparable only perhaps to the cold war non-overridding crisis elections in 1960 and 1984. Seen in the light of the Democrats' longstanding deficit on the foreign policy/national security issue, the loss is more understandable. Kerry couldn't undo 20 years of branding in 7 months.

Anna Greenberg has showed that fear (and neutralization on education) drove wavering, non politicized married women to Bush. Hard to see how Kerry could have done anything other than eke out a slight victory.

The Democrats problem goes back to the culture wars of the 1960's and Vietnam. In the culture wars, the Dems were naturally allied with forces of change -- Civil Rights, Reproductive Rights, and via the confluence of the Woodstock Nation and the Anti-War movement, the Dems became identified with the breakdown of the old fashioned social norms.

The Dems overt opposition to the Vietnam War led to the party being tagged as anti-military. These images, combined with the anti-government mood in the post Watergate era, are the essence of the subliminal attitudes that shape the American Electorate.

CKR--I had the same reaction (hence my post). I'll give him a partial pass, because I don't know that he came up with the title. But he did set it up as an example of "liberalism's continuing inability to confront [backlash populism] in an effective manner." As we know, he never addressed that part of his thesis.

The trouble I have with Franks as that his descriptive analysis actively obscures the continuing salience of race in US politics. White men have not voted for Democrats in most circumstances for years. That's big. If we listen too exclusively to Franks, we aren't going to confront this fact -- we are going to try to gloss over it.

I don't mean by this that Dems should walk away from our really existing core constituencies: women of color, men of color, and white women, in that order of intensity. But we do have to recognize the problem is real and the anxiety of white men at their slipping supremacy is kicking out butts.

Frank wrote this article a year ago, you may have seen it. It's for a European audience, and discusses "the left" as opposed to Democrats or more American-style liberals, but it definitely rings true for me. He rehashes his backlash argument in the first half, then develops why the left has failed so miserably in the second. As a Univ. of Michigan student who had endless conversations with self-proclaimed "more enlightened" Nader-voting peers in the horrible autumn of 2000, and then nearly died as Madison/Dane County nearly tipped Wisconsin to Bush... Let's just say Frank nails a certain segment of the left that we should probably always write off as unreliable.

The article is a bit superficial and doesn't even touch the party apparatus or "Big Liberalism" (think tanks, foundations, non-profits, etc.), but my experience with these types of voters (years as a neighbor and coworker and 3 elections volunteering) always makes me shudder when I hear demands to "move to the left" or "play to the base." Maybe DH could clear this up--please tell me that the imagined Democratic base looks a lot less like Ann Arbor, as much as I love it, and more like Ypsilanti?